1824 Cursed Flames (Part 2)

Tista felt so cold that she thought that she was about to die. Her core and her body were weaker than Lith's, making her even more sensitive to low temperatures. The scales over her body froze and fell, shedding just one drop of blood each before it turned solid.

The ice dug into her flesh and fell, deepening the wound.

The cold was numbing her senses but the pain remained unbearable. Faced with the death threat, the silver and the red star of her Beast life force started to spin around each other faster and faster, sucking the remaining heat in the room to survive.

A blue eye opened on Tista's forehead, right above the red one. Then, both of them lit up as she instinctively used Domination to respectively extract more heat from her surroundings and ward off the cold.

She decided to breathe Origin Flames, hoping to gain even one moment of respite from that blinding agony.

And it was then that it happened.

The effect of the Chilling Wail, Tista's twin stars, and Domination, perfectly split the fire from the water element. As she breathed in, a red light shone in between her scales, moving from her mouth to her lungs and then throughout her whole body.

Suddenly she didn't feel cold anymore, the red ice covering her turned into blood and then into a blazing red fire. Tista stood up and roared her fury as her Red Demon form produced so much heat that the air surrounding her steamed and the snow now evaporated before reaching her.

The red light moved back into her heart, up her throat, and out of her mouth in a blast of True Flames. The small spark of Cinder that she had generated had replaced the fire element in the world energy while her human and beast life force coated the rest of the elements in the world energy.

It protected them from the influence of the cursed elements and generated something new.

The True Flames moved as fast as the Void, piercing through the Chilling Wail and heating the room. The bright red fire struck one of the three standing undead, sending her flying as well.

Yet between Night's Darkness Wave and the little fire element that the Wendigo's bloodline ability had left in the surrounding world energy, the blast of True Flames wasn't enough to kill the Chosen.

To make matters worse, together with the spark of Cinder Tista had also generated a spark of Zero of equal intensity.

The cursed element ravaged her body from the inside, sucking both the heat and the life away from her. Tista had no idea what to do until she remembered what Lith had shown her about Sinmara's Forgemastering technique.

While Dragons breathed fire through their mouths, Phoenixes emitted it through their wings and Sinmara used this ability during her craftings.

'I'm not just a Dragon, I'm also a Phoenix!' Tista thought as she used her blue eye and all the willpower that she could muster to focus the spark of Zero and move it to her wings.

The Red Demon's feathers turned to a bright blue and a burst of fire of the same color erupted from them. The Frozen Flames carried the cursed water element away with them, making Tista's body temperature return to normal.

The bright red of the True Flames coming out of her mouth mixed with the blue of the Frost Flames erupting from her wings, and both reached their mark, killing the Chosen on the spot.

The two flames couldn't mix, but the thermal shock they generated was enough to shatter the prism in the undead's chest even after being weakened by Chilling Wail and Darkness Wave.

"What the fuck?" Orpal said.

The death of one of his Chosen was inconsequential to him, yet losing a prism was another story. They were imbued with his power which returned to him upon the death of their host so that he could choose whether to reabsorb it or send it to his still living Chosen.

The destruction of the prism, instead, had caused him to lose the power and the portion of his consciousness that he had stored within. The pain from the loss gave him a violent seizure that broke his focus and his connection with the remaining three Chosen.

Orpal's obsession with Lith coupled with his bonding with Night had given birth to a new ability of her prisms, yet also to an unexpected weakness. He could now impose his will upon his Chosen, but whatever damage the prisms would take, he would suffer it in full as well.

Thrud looked at his pitiful performance as he wriggled on the floor like a worm and smiled.

"Let me guess. Your plan is not going as you planned and your base is about to be taken." She said with a giggle through her communication amulet.

"My plan is working exactly as intended." He managed to snarl between spasms. "The information I leaked reached the Council and they believed it. There are over fifty members of the Hand of Fate here plus my brother."

"Excellent." Thrud nodded. "I can almost see the high and mighty Awakened Council follow the action from their headquarters, hiding underground like the rats they are. Time for my opening move. Thrud out."

Glemos had been a Regional Lord and he knew the location of the lairs of his peers from his visits over the centuries. That along with the knowledge that the Awakened apprentices she had rescued from Xedros had shared with her, gave the Mad Queen all the information she needed about their defensive systems.

"Call my elite soldiers." Thrud said to Iata the Scorpicore, her second in command. "While the Council deals with that moron, I'll deal with the Council."

Meanwhile, back in Orpal's underground palace, Tista's newfound bloodline abilities had turned the tides of the battle. Without the Dead King coordinating them, the remaining undead were left to fend for themselves.

Lith's Domination easily got rid of the remaining Chilling Wail and the Darkness Wave. War found its way through the chest of what turned out to be a Vampire, shattering another prism.

Lith had done it on purpose after hearing the pain in Orpal's voice before the mind link was cut off. Now that she had no need to protect her allies, Phloria unleashed her tier four Spirit Spell, Pinning Star that she had weaved with body casting.

The spell conjured four emerald pillars that attacked another of the undead from the front, back, above, and below. They pierced through his body while also keeping him in place and giving Phloria the exact coordinates of his prism.

It allowed her to make a fifth pillar erupt from inside Night's spawn and bypass its hard shell.

The only remaining enemy could feel Orpal's pain growing with every destroyed prism and to make matters worse, the power they contained was lost instead of reinforcing her as the plan predicted.

Cursing her bad luck, the undead accessed the bloodline powers of a Blood Witch to Blink away despite the elemental sealing arrays that protected the Death King's living quarters.

Her joy lasted only until Friya's Spirit version of Dimensional Ruler distorted the space around the Blink, making it close halfway and cutting the prism asunder.